Guanches

Before the Castilians came, the Canary Islands, off the coast of Morocco, were home to the Guanches. Descended from North African migrants related to the Berbers, they lived on the islands for perhaps two thousand years before the Crown of Castile conquered them between 1402 and 1496. Their language died out in the seventeenth century, but their ancestry, place names and some customs survive among Canary Islanders today.

The Guanches probably reached the islands at some point in the first millennium BC; pottery from the Cave of the Guanches on Tenerife points to settlement there by the sixth century BC. Genetic studies, including the first genome-wide analysis in 2017, confirm a North African origin closest to ancient Berber populations, with some ancestry ultimately from Neolithic and Bronze Age Europe, and differences between eastern and western islands suggest two waves of settlement. The name itself comes from a Tenerife word for a person of that island, later extended by the Spanish to the natives of all seven islands.

Ancient writers knew of the "Fortunate Isles". Roman objects found on and around Lanzarote show trade between the first and fourth centuries AD, though Rome never settled the islands, and Pliny relates that an expedition sent by the Mauretanian king Juba II found ruined buildings but no people. In 1341 the Genoese explorer Nicoloso da Recco recorded their numbers, the first reliable record of the language.

Each island had its own institutions. Tenerife was divided into nine kingdoms, each ruled by a mencey, and the kings owned all the land, renting it out to their people; on Gran Canaria rule passed by hereditary succession through the female line, while elsewhere leaders were elected. Trials were held in public at a court called the tagoror. People lived mostly in caves, wore goatskin or plant-fibre clothing, herded goats and sheep, and made simple pottery and weapons of fire-hardened wood, stone and obsidian. On Tenerife the dead were often embalmed with resin and placed in remote caves.

Most islands believed in a supreme being, called Achamán on Tenerife, Acoran on Gran Canaria and Abora on La Palma, alongside sun worship and a goddess mother, Chaxiraxi. An evil spirit, Guayota, was thought to live inside the volcano Teide. Worship often took place outdoors, under sacred trees or near holy mountains. The harvest festival of Beñesmen, held around 15 August, now coincides with the pilgrimage to the Virgin of Candelaria on Tenerife.

The conquest began in 1402, when Jean de Béthencourt and Gadifer de la Salle landed on Lanzarote; Fuerteventura and El Hierro followed by 1405, and many people of El Hierro were sold as slaves. La Gomera came under Castilian lords by agreement but rose against them, most violently in 1488. The Crown of Castile under Isabella I and Ferdinand then took the larger islands itself: Gran Canaria between 1478 and 1483, La Palma in 1492–93, and finally Tenerife. There, on 31 May 1494, the Guanches ambushed Alonso Fernández de Lugo in the First Battle of Acentejo; he returned with allies from the southern kingdoms, won at Aguere and in a second battle at Acentejo, and the surrender of the remaining menceys on 25 July 1496 completed the conquest.

Killings, enslavement, deportation and new diseases devastated the islanders. Several historians, among them Francisco Morales Padrón and Mohamed Adhikari, have described the conquest as genocide, while Mark Levene argues that Castile did not intend genocide even if the result was comparable. Survivors were absorbed into the new Spanish population.

Guanche heritage lives on in Silbo Gomero, the whistled language of La Gomera, in words of Canarian Spanish and in many place names. Genetic research estimates that modern Canary Islanders derive roughly 16 to 31 per cent of their ancestry from the Guanches, with a larger share through the maternal line.

Our maps draw the Guanches on the Canary Islands from 1500 BCE to 400 CE and again from 800 to 1815. The earliest of these years predates the likely first settlement, and the later ones continue after the conquest ended in 1496; the outline simply marks the archipelago. Neighbours are the Berbers on early maps, and later Morocco, Castile and Spain.